Having high speed data processing capabilities and large storage capacities, computers have been widely used in various fields of production and living, such as communications, traffic and banking. Many computers need to be in a continuously working state to ensure normal operation of the whole system. For example, once a switch server in a telecommunication department shuts down, many user terminals will not be able to communicate with one another. Once an information processing system of a bank card organization shuts down, a large number of card holders and merchants will not be able to deal with the bank card businesses, causing inconvenience to the users.
However, with the continuous development of the computer technologies and the constant changes in the application environment, data upgrade needs to be implemented for various servers within a computer system to add new functions in a timely way.
A method for upgrading data in the prior art will be described on the basis of specific hardware. Referring to FIG. 1, there is shown a schematic diagram illustrating the architecture of a prior art computer processing system, which includes a communication interface device 11, a main application server 12 and a standby server 13. The communication interface device 11 may be such a computer device as a router and a switch, which is used to establish a secure connection between the computer system and an external device/external network/external system. The main application server 12 connects the communication interface device 11 and the standby server 13.
The main purpose of such a redundant main-standby design is to ensure the security of the system. Besides, the above computer processing system is also used to upgrade software of the application server in the prior art.
The method for upgrading data includes: upgrading the software on the standby server 13; performing main-standby switching to put the standby server into a working state; upgrading the software of the main application server 12; updating data of the main application server 12 according to that of the standby server 13; and performing main-standby switching again to put the main application server 12 into a working state.
Although being able to implement upgrade without shut-down, this method for upgrading data has the following disadvantages.
First, the whole computer processing system usually includes a number of application servers each provided with a standby server 13. All the standby servers 13 are in a standby state and will actually work only upon software upgrade or a failure of the main application servers, causing great waste of the server resources.
In addition, the standby server 13 needs to be updated periodically to ensure consistence of the data thereon with that on the application server and thus occupies the CPU resources of the application server periodically to update the resources of the standby server 13, resulting in an increased processing burden on the application server.